Page:Hofstede de Groot catalogue raisonné, Volume 4, 1912.djvu/20

 6 JACOB VAN RUISDAEL SECT. and clouds according to a set pattern, and his pictures are thus easily distinguished. His green has a decidedly blue shade. GERRIT VAN HEES, who flourished in the second half of the seven- teenth century, had become entirely forgotten when, about thirty years ago, attention was called to his fully signed picture in the Houck collec- tion at Deventer, which is now in the Haarlem Museum. He did not deserve this fate. He painted pictures like the famous " Landscape with the Planks " in the Vienna Academy (No. 893), and most of his unsigned pictures are generally sold as the work of Ruisdael or Hobbema, from which they are not readily distinguished. It is difficult to describe them briefly. It must suffice to mention specially typical works by Van Hees, in the Rennes Museum, which is signed in full ; at Lille ; in the Thayer collection, Boston ; in the Delaroff collection, St. Petersburg ; in the Pacher collection, Vienna ; in the collection of Sir Audley Neeld, Grittle- ton House ; and in the S. B. Goldschmidt sale, Berlin, with many others. The last painter of the group of predecessors and contemporaries who must be named here is ALLAERT VAN EVERDINGEN (1621-75). In his northern hill-landscapes with torrents and waterfalls he served as a model for Ruisdael. It is still an open question whether Ruisdael himself saw such scenes in nature, or whether he took the motive from the elder man and then varied it according to his own impressions, perhaps gained in visits to Berg and Mark across the Rhine. Everdingen's pictures are as a rule more uniform, and more sketchy and less full of detail than those of Ruisdael. Among Ruisdael's own pupils, MEINDERT HOBBEMA (1638-1709) stands far above all the rest. But as his work is treated separately in the next section, he need only be mentioned here. JAN VAN KESSEL (1641 or 42-79) was, for the most part, a slavish imitator of Ruisdael's panoramic landscapes, waterfalls, and views of towns. His work is more sketchy in detail, and the contrasts of light and shade are harder. He is in some ways attractive when he follows his model very closely, but even then he remains an imitator, as in his landscape at the Rotterdam Museum. Van Kessel, besides copying Ruisdael, also imitated A. van Everdingen and the elder JOHANNES VERMEER of Haarlem (after 1600-1670), especially Vermeer's distant views over the plain of Haarlem, which in their turn were strongly influenced by Ruisdael. These land- scapes by Vermeer may be distinguished externally from similar works by Ruisdael in that, almost without exception, they have in one corner or the other of the foreground a dune in shadow projecting upwards into the scene and serving as a contrast to the rest of the composition. Vermeer's work has less variety, too, in colour and in the distribution of earth and sky, hill and cloud. Half a dozen painters like CORNELIS DECKER (before 1643-78) and his less well-known namesake JAN DECKER (who was at work 1640-60), ROELOF (i63i-after 1681) and MICHIEL VAN VRIES (who flourished in the second half of the seventeenth century), SALOMON (before 1650-1702) and JILLES ROMBOUTS (who flourished in the second half of the seven-